ANewDomain.net Exclusive: Fighting the Inhumanity

At signings people are asking me whether we should be at war against ISIS. Here, exclusive to ANewDomain.net, is my response:

Drawing comparisons to the Nazi Holocaust, corporate media (i.e., “mainstream”) pundits like New York Times columnist Roger Cohen agrees with President Obama’s argument that ISIS represents an existential threat to what they euphemistically call “American strategic interests in the Middle East” — oil, gas, pipelines, Israel, our pet dictators and autocrats — and to humanity. And humanism.

“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, has created a cult of violence that makes the elimination of all nonbelievers the cornerstone of a movement whose avowed objective is a restored Islamic caliphate but whose raison d’être is the slaughter itself,” Cohen writes.

Citing Aushwitz survivor Primo Levi’s definition of the Germans’ behavior in the death camps as “counter-human,” Cohen concludes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: “Presented with the counter-human, the human must fight back.”

When someone claims that someone else acts violently without cause — “senselessly,” “cowardly,” as its own “raison d’être — my bullshit detector goes off.

Read more here.

4 Comments.

  • “strategic interests” what a wonderful bit of newspeak. The mugger in the alleyway is simply looking out for his strategic interest in food & housing. Nothing wrong with that.

  • Today’s gratuitous Sci Fi reference: Harry Harrison’s Deathworld. The planet Pyrrhus is the deadliest planet in the galaxy. Huge vicious animals that could eat a Tyrannosaurus for breakfast; mobile poisonous plants that could eat the Tyrannosaurus eater for brunch. The humans live in an armored compound which is regularly breached by the flora and fauna, resulting in terrifying battles for survival. It’s so dangerous that even the children carry weapons as soon as they learn to walk. The humans are slowly losing the war.

    Yet outside the compound live outcasts, known as “talkers” because they can communicate with the dangerous critters and live peaceably among them. One of the talkers notes that the city dwellers had built their compound smack in the middle of the worst beasties and most vicious weeds on the entire horrific planet.

    yeah, yeah, “Spoiler Alert”

    The kicker? The Indigenous life on Phyrris is wired to evolve at an astounding rate. The reason that the city is located in the worst-of-the-worst is because the locals evolved to fight the humans which were fighting them; the talkers get along fine because they aren’t fighting in the first place.

    I don’t know whether Harrison had a metaphor in mind when he wrote the book, but damned if it doesn’t look a lot like the Muddle East today. The more countries we turn into hellholes, the more we create the conditions which spawn the likes of ISXX. The more people we kill, the more we draw the ire of those we spawned. The more we fight them, the more they fight back.

    … duh?

  • alex_the_tired
    October 2, 2014 12:19 PM

    Crazy,

    Thanks for the book suggestion.

    Your comment makes me think more of the economic rather than evolutionary issues. The best analogy I ever encountered for the Middle East was in college when all the class room memo boards had ads for credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, Discover, they all wanted to just give you a free credit card. Lots of chains had credit cards too. One person in my dorm had 11 credit cards.

    So here’s my credit cards: I’ve got the IsraelCard, SyriaOne, IraqCard, PrimeAfghanistan, BankOfTalibania, a couple others. What I do, see, is take an advance from each one to pay the minimums on the others. I haven’t even touched two of them yet, but the others are getting to be a problem. IraqCard is maxed out completely. I can make the minimum payment, but that’s dropping the balance by 11 cents a month. It’ll take me 53 years to pay it down, and that’s assuming I don’t put anything on it ever again!

    Like I said, two of the cards, I haven’t even touched yet. But, funny thing, I’m not getting any more offers in the mail for more cards.

    What happens when the U.S. swipes its plastic and NONE of the cards work? How long does the whole juggling match remain in the air? How much damage will there be when it all collapses over there?

    • You mix a mean metaphor, my man.

      Now that you mention it, the other two books in the series are quite obviously commentaries on socioeconomics (while still being entertaining)

      In one of them, (spoiler, k?) the hero must defeat the mongrel horde. He first tries direct confrontation & that doesn’t work out so well. He then tries civilizing them by introducing trade goods, agriculture, etc. THAT worked. They stopped riding and fighting and settled down to the business of building a civilization.

      The ME had civilization while the Europeans were still rubbing blue mud on their bellies and howling at the moon. But every time they start to settle down nowadays, we hold a war in their backyard; depose their democratically-elected leaders; or fund bloodthirsty dictators simply because they promise us cheap oil.

      Where would Iran be today if we hadn’t reinstated the Shah back in 1953? Would the house of al Saud have lasted this long if we hadn’t been propping them up? Or would the locals have defenestrated them in favor of a more moderate bunch?

      I do not believe that *fighting* ISXX is the answer. Send food, tools, medical supplies, etc, but no more weapons to any side. Send in the peace corps rather than the marine corps, teach ’em modern farming techniques instead of guerrilla warfare.

      They need to have a safe, stable society before they can grow into a freer society. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge at first, what matters is that they get time and stability they need to grow.

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